Appendix: Marketing Hacks

Bonus: Marketing hacks#

Here’s a list of “hacks” that can get you quick wins with marketing yourself. Try them out, and let me know how it goes!

Help others market#

This is so simple as to feel “dumb” even pointing it out, but it works. You want practice in marketing but don’t want to take the full plunge yourself or don’t feel like you have something to offer yet. You can find others who are brilliant but uninterested in marketing and offer free marketing help! Here’s Dan Abramov:

📝 Note: I’m pretty good at making demos, but I’m not very good at original ideas. So, what I try to do is find smart people with really good ideas who are struggling to explain those ideas and why those ideas matter, and I popularize them because those ideas deserve that. I think people respond to that, and you remember who you learn from.

Market the same thing three different ways#

A great exercise to hone your marketing skills is to interpret the same thing in three different ways. During a prior job, I was forced to queue up tweets for the same blog post multiple times, but because of Twitter rules, I wasn’t allowed to repeat myself. I used to dread this but then reframed it when I realized that this was a great exercise in figuring out how to market the same thing to different audiences.

You can do this with your own personal brand, too. You’re a multidimensional person — if there is some part of you that connects better with your audience in context, use that! I recommend Leil Lowndes’ How to Talk To Anyone for great tips on this.

Crosspost on industry blogs#

A nice way to get attention for your work is to do great work on someone else’s platform. Industry blogs (and newsletters) are pretty much always looking for quality content. For frontend devs, the ones with rigorous editing are CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and A List Apart. For backend, you can try Twilio, Digital Ocean, or Linode’s blogs.

Collaborations#

Related to crossposting and helping others, you can raise your profile by working with others who already have very high profiles. Justin Mares bootstrapped his own profile by coauthoring a book with Gabe Weinberg, Founder of DuckDuckGo. Same for Blake Masters with Peter Thiel. Ben Casnocha with Reid Hoffman.

If you can work out a non-exploitative deal where you do a bunch of legwork but learn a lot and co-publish with the author, take it. This is a rare deal; most often, you will just be picking up what they put down and working your way toward becoming a peer the slow way. If they have a meetup, forum, podcast, or whatever platform, show up on theirs, and then get them to show up on yours.

Industry awards#

Some people set a lot of store by awards and certifications. Well regarded programs include Microsoft MVP, Google GDE, and AWS Heroes. As a pure signaling mechanism, certifications work like anything else — an unhappy mix of credible, gamified, and incomplete. However, having a bunch of logos on your site/slides generally helps you, so long as they are not your biggest claim to fame.

Memorable words/catchphrase/motto#

This is used by companies and reality stars alike and can be a bit tacky if you try to make fetch happen, but if you strike a nerve and capture the zeitgeist, you can really carry your message far. Nike spends billions to make sure that every time you think of the words “Just Do It,” they come up. You can do that too.

Friendcatchers#

Make them.

Visualize your work#

If you draw, you can be WORLD BEATING at marketing. Draw everything you can, even the invisible stuff. ESPECIALLY the invisible stuff. If you say you cannot draw, that’s a lie. Use Excalidraw.

Elevator pitch#

In the old days, you prepared a pitch literally for when you ran into the decisionmaker on a thirty-second elevator ride. A typical template goes something like “if you’re a <role> who <point of view>, I/my thing <what it does> in <some eyepopping metric>.” In this day of both TikTok and podcasts, attention spans are both shorter and longer than that. You need to tailor your elevator pitch accordingly. Be able to sell yourself/your idea/your project in:

• 1 hour
• 15 minutes
• 5 minutes
• 30 seconds
• 280 characters (a tweet)
• (stretch goal) 2 words

Summarize the top three books in your field for your blog#

This idea is often attributed to Tim Ferriss, but I’m sure multiple people have come up with it. The idea is that you don’t have to be original to have a great blog: it’s easy to bootstrap your web presence — and your own expertise — by covering the existing ground. If you do it very well, you can rise to prominence for this reason alone: Shane Parrish and Mike Dariano built Farnam Street and The Waiter’s Pad purely off summaries. Then practice marketing your summaries by syndicating them on Twitter. Make talks out of them at work and on YouTube.

Further reading#

Flawless app’s Marketing for Engineers repo is a hand-picked collection of resources for solving practical marketing tasks, like finding beta testers, growing the first user base, advertising projects without a budget, and scaling marketing activities for building constant revenue streams.